


valor is learned

by fitzefitcher



Series: I'm going to save all the Legion NPCs and no one can stop me [1]
Category: Warcraft - All Media Types, World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Gen, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 23:57:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8122564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fitzefitcher/pseuds/fitzefitcher
Summary: The thing that unlocks his cage is not a creature he’s seen before.
(He's not supposed to be here.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> anyway so I’m super unsatisfied with the fate of this NPC from the helheim questline, Colborn the Unworthy, so I wrote a little self-indulgent prompt of what could have happened, instead.

  
The thing that unlocks his cage is not a creature he’s seen before.

Tall, yes, uncannily similar to the night-kissed elves, but not as dark, no, the creature’s skin bright as midday sea water, with orange eyes that sear sun-bright, and he honestly didn’t remember either sun or sea until the manifestation of it walked right up to his cage. Wilder, definitely, with hair a color he’s never seen, tuquoise and unruly, and with fangs that don’t bother to hide behind their lips, claws that are long and sharp.

“We are going to leave,” they say, hushed and hurried as behind them, their would-be companion, the winged queen herself, hacks at kvaldir that would attempt to interrupt. “Do you know a way out?” Their voice- Her voice?- is smoother than expected, and deeper, accent foreign to his ears. (Thought admittedly, he hadn’t much time on Midgard before being snatched to Helheim- barely over twenty, and first voyage out to sea ending in a shipwreck, getting dragged down here in the first place.)

She stares at him insistently, pupils burning through the pervasive mist and to his core. He hesitates, a painful half-second between them, before nodding hastily. The creature hums, affirming, and unlocks the door to the cage, the key’s original bearer splayed across the ground in a pile of congealed blood and seaweed a few feet away.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he says, and she nods. He’s not supposed to be here. She believes him, and the thought is jarring.

He explains quickly a plan that he’d been kicking around for some time now, for how long, he’s not sure; he’s not even really sure how long he’s been down here, the ever-present darkened fog negating any sort of way to keep the time. He tells her and the val'kyr what they need, and he had expected them to take days, and instead they took minutes. They lay waste to Helheim; they cut down the kvaldr to nothing, they free the other lost souls and incite them into a rage, they destroy everything in their path. The val'kyr he had expected as much, wings golden and blinding, but the creature- Shuuna, her name was- is a font of power, soul a beacon in the dark, searing away the mists, while his is barely a flicker.

He doesn’t belong here, he tells himself. It’s less and less convincing each time.

“Colborn, is this enough?” Shuuna asks, and he can only stare speechless before regaining his composure, spitting out a smartassed “Yer braver than I thought, outsider,” half-hearted grin on his lips.

“I’m sure Helya will see that neither ye nor I belong here once we get past that dog of hers,” he states, more to himself than her, but Shuuna nods all the same, chuckling. Her toothy grin is reassuring. He feels more awake than he has in a long time. Things seem crisper, brighter, even through the revolting stench of the half-rotten seaweed.

He’s alright until they get about halfway down the road, and fear starts to prickle up the back of his neck, throat closing up with each step closer to the guard dog. They come within sight of it, and he freezes. Shuuna and the val'kyr move on, undaunted somehow by the thing that’s been terrorizing his every waking moment for how long now he doesn’t know. He hesitates. Fear grips him, it and shame coiling hotly around his heart, and he hesitates. All he can do is fixate on the dog, feet frozen to the ground, and the light of the worthy ones’ souls drifts farther and farther away.

He is but an ember, burning down to his last, and when the dog begins to stir, he remains still, heart pounding in his ears.

Something curls around his numbed fingers, warm and dry and sending a jolt up his arm.

“We don’t have much time,” Shuuna whispers, and tugs him forward, the val'kyr motioning for them to hurry. He lurches forward at her insistence, a strange sort of numbness coming over him but for the heat of her hand. They trudge across the muddy ground quickly, and by the time the dog’s out of sight, his hand is a vicegrip around hers.

“We don’t belong here,” Shuuna tells Helya, and Helya splits her soul in twain. He should’ve known better, he supposes, mourning, but the creature- Shuuna- drags herself up. Her spirit is in pieces, but the piece she has in her clenched first could be a shard of the moon for how bright and stark it is through the fog.

“We don’t belong here,” she grits through her teeth, baring her fangs, and Helya scowls but harasses them no more. She concedes to them, and makes them a deal. An unfair one, but a deal just the same, which is infinitely better than the alternative.

The first soul shard isn’t too far off- stuck in a rotting growth of roots and seaweed inside a cave nearby. The one she’s got clutched in her fist is still enough for her to drag herself forward, apparently, still enough to call up whatever power lies inside and strike down the jailor, a one-eyed muck creature. She plucks her own soul from the roots, and it evaporates in her hand, the original shard growing bigger, brighter. The second and third go about the same, needing hardly any help at all from the val'kyr, and certainly not his own. He ends up hanging back, mostly, mixed between awestruck and vulnerable, unsure of where he should be, what he should be doing.

“How are you not afraid?” he asks, when she’s recovered her soul completely and after he’s watched it knit itself back together before his very eyes. Shuuna gives him a weird look.

“I am afraid,” she tells him, incredulous. “Of course I’m afraid. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be?”

“How can you do these things?” he asks, when they’re trudging back up the path to kill Helya’s pet, the rotting giant roaming the darkened, misty fields.

“Fear is instinct,” she says, the cacophony of battle echoing in the distance, eyes glinting bright as the sun he knows only from memory. “Valor is learned.”

When they descend down into the basin where the giant lay, Shuuna wasted no time in striking at it with her strange light-bolts, the fury twisting her features into a snarl made manifest. Ashildir’s wings flare into existence, axe singing through the air as she roars. The other cursed souls they’d freed earlier join them, their cries a battle hymn as they rush into the basin.

Colborn picks up a sword lying abandoned by a fallen combatant, the creature’s foul blood still coating the blade. With shaking hands, he charges. He fights.


End file.
